Conventional fixed-service satellite (FSS) systems use one or more large wide beams to cover a large geographic area. Modern satellite communication is moving away from FSS towards HTS systems in which the satellite employs a large number of narrow spot beams and relies on color re-use to improve throughput at each beam. HTS is considered particularly attractive because it enables higher throughput for both uplink and downlink, and modern satellite communication needs place a greater emphasis on two-way traffic, i.e. both uplink and downlink to end equipment, such as for satellite-based mobile internet.
Color re-use is one way to reduce inter-beam interference, but use of a high number of colors may result in limited bandwidth being allocated to each spot beam. This may lead to quickly exhausting the satellite capacity, particularly for downlink transmission as that tends to be higher demand. Lower color re-use can improve bandwidth available but at a cost of higher inter-beam interference. Higher inter-beam interference adversely impacts the achievable throughput of the system and may also lower spectrum efficiency. Accordingly, conventional HTS systems are implemented with a fixed color re-use pattern that attempts to balance these factors. Typically, this is a four color re-use pattern.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to have improved methods and systems operating HTS systems and, in particular, techniques to manage and balance spectrum demand, interference problems, and spectrum efficiency so as to enable improved throughput.
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